The Cabot South Paw: A Very Fine 1911 for Lefties

Left-handed shooters have a lot of tricks up their sleeves when it comes to using right-handed guns, and many people practice and train to shoot with both hands and work out ambidextrous and handedness-independent techniques that anyone can use to operate guns that don’t have leftie-friendly controls. That being said, it’s nice to have a gun that just works and doesn’t require learning special drills to operate left-handed.

Cabot Guns recognizes this, and decided to make a fully-reversed 1911. All the controls, the safety, the slide stop and the magazine release, are on the right side. And naturally, the ejection port is on the left.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Cabot gun if it wasn’t made to the tightest of tolerances with the highest quality building materials. The South Paw is milled from blocks of billet 4140 billet steel and the grips come in California olive wood, box elder and locally-harvested walnut from their very own family farm.

The South Paw is built around durability and accuracy, and is designed to exceed National Match accuracy standards. That means at 50 yards the South paw can fire three 10-shot groups no larger than 2-1/2 inches across consecutively, using match-grade ammunition. In order to make the recoil impulse a perfect reflection of a right-handed 1911, the South Paw even reverses the direction of the rifling.

The only major departure from most 1911 designs is the front sight, which is dovetailed along the bore and installed from the front of the slide, which makes the muzzle of the South Paw completely seamless and smooth. Front sight options include white dot, tritium dot and gold dot. South Paws will also be available in two finishes, a dark grey nitride finish as well as with a traditional bluing.

Other features include an aluminum skeletonized trigger and matching skeletonized hammer, 20 line-per-inch (LPI) checkering on the front- and backstrap, a lowered and extended ejection port, a chamfered magazine well and polished ejection port. The package includes a Cabot barrel bushing wrench, manual, 8-round magazine, child safety lock and manual.

Cabot will be manufacturing just 100 of these limited-edition South Paws this year, but if you’re worried they’ll all get snatched up before you get a chance to buy one for yourself, these work-of-art 1911s are priced accordingly at $5,500—something tells use they won’t just fly off the shelves. South Paws make for instant heirlooms, so you better hope your kids are lefties, too.

The market for super-premium 1911s has always been around and strong. Now there’s an option out there just for lefties, and they’ve pulled out all the stops while they were at it. If you’re interested in ordering one of these amazing left-handed 1911s or just long to look at more photos, check out Cabot’s website here.

Post your Comments

I'm lucky that as a lefty, I'm right-eye dominant. I can perform the simple, mundane tasks of firing a semi-auto right-handed and still reload with my smarter left hand. Still, this is a beautiful handgun and I wish I had the money to get one.

Max, thanks for raising awareness of our small company and our South Paw. We agree the industry - one of the big guys - needs to make a more accessible lefty. Ours is not cheap but it's a true ultra-precision pistol constructed with the same high technology techniques used with on our other boutique models.